YASIV Blog

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Storytelling with Data was a surprise for me. Working on YASIV I often find myself testing it with the same test queries. I've been using "data visualization" as a test query for couple years, and the graph landscape didn't change too much.

Not until recently. The "Storytelling with Data" appeared on this search, and took top ranks on multiple scores:

Popularity - this score shows how many other books list "Storytelling with Data" among their "Customers also bought" list.

PageRank - this score shows probability that a reader will open "Storytelling with Data" if she randomly walks from one "also bought" book to another (assuming she only explores a graph below).

I'm currently half way through the book and deeply enjoy it. I'll let you decide whether you like this book or not yourself.

Today I just wanted to share YASIV's graph of this book, analyze major clusters and see if we can find any opportunities for new books. Let's go!

Here is a snapshot of "Storytelling with Data" book graph (April 2016):

While the graph above shows all product images, it is very hard to see existing clusters behind images. The "Storytelling with Data" describes this problem as a "lack of clear contrast". Let's fix it by temporary replacing product images with circles, and assign color for each cluster:

“Approach visualization as if you were telling a story. What kind of story are you trying to tell? Is it a report, or is it a novel? Do you want to convince people that action is necessary?”

“you should always be on the lookout for these two things whatever your graphic is for: patterns and relationships.”

“Data-checking and verification is one of the most important—if not the most important—part of graph design.”

“So it’s not just about the data that makes for interesting chatter. It’s how you present it and design it that can help people remember.”

“Think character development. Every data point has a story behind it in the same way that every character in a book has a past, present, and future. There are interactions and relationships between those data points. It’s up to you to find them. Of course, before expert storytellers write novels, they must first learn to construct sentences.”

Data Science for Business

“Data science is the transformation of data using mathematics and statistics into valuable insights, decisions, and products.”

“Cluster analysis is the practice of gathering up a bunch of objects and separating them into groups of similar objects.”

“If you define big data as turning transactional business data into decisions and insight using cutting-edge analytics (regardless of where that data is stored), then yes, this is a book about big data.”

“clustering is called exploratory data mining, because these clustering techniques help tease out relationships in large datasets that are too hard to identify with an eyeball.”

“Cluster analysis with k-means, as you'll soon see, is part math, part story-telling. But its intuitive simplicity is part of the attraction.”

“statistical inference is the discipline that concerns itself with the development of procedures, methods, and theorems that allow us to extract meaning and information from data that has been generated by stochastic (random) processes.”

“Overfitting is the term used to mean that you used a dataset to estimate the parameters of your model, but your model isn’t that good at capturing reality beyond your sampled data.”

“Data science is the civil engineering of data. Its acolytes possess a practical knowledge of tools and materials, coupled with a theoretical understanding of what’s possible.”

“There are important reasons anyone working with data should do EDA. Namely, to gain intuition about the data; to make comparisons between distributions; for sanity checking (making sure the data is on the scale you expect, in the format you thought it should be); to find out where data is missing or if there are outliers; and to summarize the data.”

“Once we datafy things, we can transform their purpose and turn the information into new forms of value.”

“Before you begin writing your presentation, map out that transformation—where your audience is starting, and where you want people to end up.”

“The people in your audience came to see what you can do for them, not what they must do for you. So look at the audience as the “hero” of your idea—and yourself as the mentor who helps people see themselves in that role so they’ll want to get behind your idea and propel it forward.”

“People don’t fall asleep during conversations, but they often do during presentations—and that’s because many presentations don’t feel conversational.”

“Pick the one type of person in the room with the most influence, and write your presentation as if just to that subgroup.”

“Give the hero a special gift: Give people insights that will improve their lives.”

“Controlling, framing, and conveying the narrative of your venture is the torchbearer’s primary role. To motivate travelers, you’ll need a torchbearer’s communication toolkit: You will deliver speeches, tell stories, hold ceremonies, and use symbols to ease transitions and keep up spirits.”

“They are the ones who can make your dream a reality, but only if it becomes their dream, too.”

“A healthy organization should be in constant motion, always embracing and adapting to a new future.”

“Smart leaders who shoot from the hip instead of planning their communications for an important meeting can end up wreaking havoc because they didn’t consider how others would react to their words.”

Ideas for new books

In the top left corner we have books about programming and data science. Bottom right is taken by classic works of Edward R. Tufte

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These books are clearly from two different areas - no wonder there is no short path between them. However, I often wonder - what would be a programmers oriented book, that takes main principles of Envisioning Information and translates them into a modern programming language (JavaScript/Python)?

Or, maybe a book about how to explain complex software projects by visual means? Oh I would love that book! Can you write a book like this? Please?